Legal Hybridity in Shakespeare: Revisiting the Post-Colonial in The Tempest and Cymbeline (c) Eric Heinze, QMUL, 2016 This text is Chapter 8 of the forthcoming book Hybridity: Law, Culture and Development (Lemay- Hebert & Freedman, eds. Routledge, 2016) Abstract. If post-colonialism figures among the decisive political and intellectual movements of the 20th century, then ‘hybridity’ is rapidly distinguishing the 21st. Where post-colonial theory had focussed on destruction and appropriation, hybridity focuses on exchange, examining the processes of mutual discovery and influence between imperial and vassal cultures. Never has a literary classic—already several hundred years old—so powerfully spurred an historical movement as did Shakespeare’s Tempest for mid-20th century post-colonialism. (A leading figure like the Martiniquais poet and statesman Aimé Césaire would altogether re-write the play to mirror that simultaneously political and intellectual revolution.) This essay witnesses the progression of post-colonial theory into the new century. If The Tempest long stood as ‘the’ post-colonial drama in the Shakespearean corpus, it can now re-join the lesser known Cymbeline, which was written around the same time and serves largely as a companion piece. Together the two plays elicit the distinctly hybrid nature of cultural exchange within imperial power structures. KEYWORDS: colonialism, hybridity, imperialism, law and literature, legal hybridity, legal theory, post-colonialism, Shakespeare Prof. Eric Heinze Faculty of Laws Queen Mary University of London London E1 4NS
[email protected] Heinze, Legal hybridity in Shakespeare, 10.01.2016 18:01:59, p 1 Legal Hybridity in Shakespeare: Revisiting the Post-Colonial in The Tempest and Cymbeline (c) Eric Heinze, QMUL, 20161 Our courtiers say all’s savage but at court; Experience, O thou disprov’st report!2 0.